Zan Wannemuehler’s lungs bled for days last April.
She had been part of a volunteer crew building a straw-bale home on
the Hopi Reservation in Arizona, and the concrete dust aggravated
an already nasty case of bronchitis.

But last September
found her back in Hopiland again, working long days in another
cloud of concrete dust and heat.

Wannemuehler, a petite
40-something in Carhartts, was one of 75 volunteers from the
Montana-based Red Feather Development Group. She’d traveled
from Montana, where she helped build a house on the Northern
Cheyenne Reservation, to the Hopi village of Bacavi. She used up
all of her vacation time from her pathology job, and then took
another two months of unpaid leave. And she plans to do the same
next year. “I can’t not do it,” she says.
“Someone has asked for help, and I’ve been given some
ability to provide that help.”

The volunteers spent
from one to four weeks on a ridge overlooking Third Mesa, stacking
and sculpting straw bales, lining them inside and out with chicken
wire and covering the straw-bale walls with stucco. Since it was
founded in 1994, Red Feather has completed 54 projects on seven
reservations across the West, trying to ease the housing
deficiencies and substandard living conditions that have long
plagued Indian Country. These aren’t handouts — the
homeowner is responsible for securing a mortgage. But the
cooperative approach, with homeowners and volunteers pitching in
together, brings down costs significantly.

The homeowner
in this case is Kerri Shebola, a warm-hearted Hopi in her late 20s
who has faced more than her fair share of difficulties: Her
8-year-old son, Matthew, has been fighting leukemia for the last
five years. His condition is not helped by the mud walls and poor
ventilation typical of dwellings in Bacavi, the Shebolas’
hometown. Shebola has had to divide her time between an apartment
in Polacca, Ariz., and hospitals and doctors’ offices in
Tucson, eight hours away.

This has made for a lonely and
challenging life. But this fall, she worked shoulder to shoulder
with the volunteers, mimicking the Hopi tradition of anaya, or
working communally. With this crowd, she found, loneliness was
impossible.

Wannemuehler says the volunteers also benefit
in intangible ways. “I think that I grow as a person every
time I come to these builds,” she says. “I come away
with different ideas; I have an ever-growing network of people and
connections.”

On a chilly September evening, with
just five days left in the monthlong project, generator-powered
lights cast a cozy glow on the interior of the emerging house.
Inside, Wannemuehler and a few other volunteers mud and sand the
drywall for the next day’s painting. The other members of the
crew are resting their aching, chapped and delaminating bodies
elsewhere. With fewer people, there’s more room to move, to
be loose, and the workers relax into a congenial rhythm. John Vik,
one of Red Feather’s longest-serving volunteers, says this is
the magic time that makes it all worthwhile.

For Shebola,
the magic time will come at the end of the month, when her modest,
stucco-covered new home sits among the rabbitbrush and sage. But
the Red Feather volunteers did more than build her a house; they
helped end her painful isolation. In gratitude, she plans to share
the gift, using the knowledge she gained to guide the next
applicants through the knotty process of securing utilities and
financing for a Red Feather home. It’s a small gesture, she
says, but it will produce much-needed results.

“I
hope that we can continue to work with one another so that we
provide more homes for our Hopi people, because it’s so badly
needed,” she says.

The writer lives among the boulders and bouteloua in
Prescott, Arizona, co-publishing her very own newsmagazine, Read It
Here.